Relias: Uprising (16 page)

 It was somewhat regrettable killing a Quo but Luke needed the meat. He looked around the herd for a Quo that didn’t have young. There were several bull Quos that grazed along the outer ring of the pack and Luke would probably take one of those. But take a bull and you remove the potential for future generations. Luke was torn.

 Then, as if to solve his dilemma, a large solitary bull Quo came in from the opposite edge of the meadow; it was scarred, dark eyed and mean looking. It didn’t have a herd. Perfect.

 It started making heavy, waddling steps towards the other Quos, breathing heavily through its nose and keeping its eyes on one of the females. Luke grinned and removed his sword from the leather straps on his back, parted the bushes and strode into the clearing. Resting his sword across his shoulders Luke went to intersect the bull before it reached the female.

 The bull didn’t see Luke until look stood directly in front of him. Though Luke was no more a nuisance than any of the surrounding wildflowers the bull stopped, began making frustrated grunts and pounding its front feet. The more Luke seemed unmoved by its attempts at intimidation the harder the Quo tried to scare him. Soon it was spreading its wings and rearing back, throwing all of its weight onto its front feet and pounding the ground so hard it shook. The herd of Quos began to get jittery and had started forming up closer to one another while the males kept towards the outside in defense.

 The bull Quo roared. It got into Luke’s face and continued to roar. Again, Luke didn’t budge. Then, the moment that Luke had been waiting for. The Quo took several lumbering steps backwards and it attacked.

 Channeling Furo through his legs Luke leapt into the air and landed on top of the bull, grabbing one of the rounded spines that came out of its back and getting himself steady on its back. This made the Quo even more furious. It bucked and jumped and shook as hard as it could to break Luke’s grip. While it struggled Luke crawled his way up towards the top of the Quo’s head. Then something happened Luke hadn’t intended: the Quo took flight.

 It spread its wings and beat them with amazing force, sending waves through the long grass and forcing any loose object and debris to go tumbling away in the wind. Luke was thrust to his stomach with the added gravity of the liftoff.

 The meadow began to get smaller as the Quo flew higher, his rumbling, deep-throated roars echoing through the valley. Luke regained his footing and looked down to see the trees zipping below them. The Quo shook its body and banked in the air in attempts to toss Luke from its back.

 Luke was being tossed back and forth. Quos weren’t like Razorbacks. They didn’t have the large, armored scales that Razorbacks had which made them convenient for riding. The Quo’s skin was devoid of any handhold save for the small bumpy spines that rose up on its back.

 The wind whistled explosions in Luke’s ears. His long coat flapped like a flag in a coming storm. The wind drew tears from his eyes and streaked them across his cheeks. The tendons in the back of his hand bulged as Luke’s fingertips held on with all their worth.

 The Quo arched its back and started trying to bite at Luke. It barely had a neck to speak of and the attempts were harmless. But the attempts made the ride even rougher, which didn’t help Luke at all. The Quo was massive though. Luke would’ve had no problem standing on its back if it weren’t bucking and tossing in the air. But it was, and Luke could barely keep balanced.

 He had only one choice but he didn’t want to kill the Quo in the air. And jamming his sword into its back for a makeshift handhold would only make it struggle worse, and since his sword had a frictionless edge it wouldn’t have stuck too well anyhow. And killing it that high in the air would have crashed the beast into the hard ground and ruined half the meat.

 With Furo coursing through his hands, Luke grabbed the spines with all his strength and climbed towards the Quos head, fighting the winds and keeping his body close to the Quo’s. He’d get to the head and force it to land at which point he’d kill it. It was a plan. Not a good one, but a plan nonetheless.  

 The Quo barrel-rolled.

 Luke held on with three fingers as it spun, doing a single rotation and returning upright. He renewed his grip and was shocked. He had no idea an animal of that size could maneuver like that.

 The forest had disappeared into sharp rocky quarries that reached to the horizon. Now a hundred feet up, the ground disappeared beneath them and reappeared almost a thousand feet lower. The cliff was perfectly pale and flat, like the drywall in a dirty house.

 Luke had no idea which direction was which now; north, south, east, it was all the same right now.

 The Quo barrel-rolled again. Luke yelled at it in vain anger. His grip was loosening. He could barely hang on now. His forearms burned. His fingers were numb.

 Luke could feel the Quo’s body tensing up. It was getting ready for another barrel roll.

 It would lose Luke if it rolled again. Knowing this, Luke mustered every last bit of strength he had in his arms, pulled up hard on his hand hold and lunged for the Quo’s horns.

 It dove as he did. The Quo disappeared out from beneath him.

 He hung there for a moment giving him plenty of time to realize how high he was.

  Looking down and starting into a fall, he saw the Quo in a hard dive, its wings tucked, barreling towards the ground. Dumb animal. How could something that big move like that?

 Luke was picking up speed, falling faster and faster towards the hard, rocky ground below. The Quo had evened out and was skimming the surface of the rocks.

 Luke moved his arms in the air, trying to reorient his body in the right direction. There was nothing but rushing air.

 Luke swore. He didn’t have the energy to use elemental much without risk of killing himself. He hadn’t anticipated using so much elemental and hadn’t adequately prepared.

 The ground was only a hundred feet below, the small objects getting larger and the large objects getting enormous. Luke shook his head, oriented himself towards the Quo and exhaled deeply. He was going to die anyway.
The hell with it.

 Luke thrust an arm out, read the path of the Quo and created a Grav-field as a deep, dull pain seared through his body.

 Luke’s pained shout echoed across the quarry.

  The large black and purple orb appeared ahead of the Quo, starting small and growing quick. Luke’s trajectory switched in a blink, ripping his extremities to the side like a rag doll. He now fell almost parallel to the ground, the distance between him and the Quo closing faster as he accelerated as though he were falling towards the ground.

 The Quo was flying low; only fifty feet or so off the ground.

 Perfect.

 Luke fell in a straight line towards the Grav-field, streamlining himself to move as fast as possible. The Quo had passed under it and had continued flying casually and calmly, having no idea that Luke had returned.

 Luke passed through the Grav-field like it was a dark cloud of mist, his momentum carrying him out the other side. Now with the Grav-field behind him, Luke began to slow down, appearing as though he were connected to the Grav-field by an invisible rubber bad. The instant Luke felt deceleration he waved his hand and the Grav-field dissipated.

 He was free falling once more, aiming for the head. He prayed he was as accurate as he hoped he was.

 Luke’s shadow shot up the Quo’s back; he was only a few feet above it now.

 The Quo sensed him. With a roar, it prepared to make a sharp turn.

 At breakneck speeds, Luke readied his sword.

 The Quo made the turn. Hard.

 Luke almost missed it. The sword buried into the thick skull of the Quo and disappeared up to the hilt. The body of the animal went limp and fell to the earth. Luke got to one knee, got a good grip on his sword and prepared for impact.

 The other moons were high in the sky by the time Luke had made it back to his cave. The atmosphere of the planets that their moon orbited glowed against the navy sky while the planets themselves obscured a good portion of the sky, one behind the other. It was bright enough that, if he
could
see, he wouldn’t need any light besides that of the moons. By the time he’d got a bearing on his surroundings it was already dawn and the wildlife was coming out. The same pack of Styklers that had invaded his camp stalked all around him as he pulled the dead Quo back to camp by its massive tail.

 Upon limping and wheezing into camp, Luke was surprised that he had the strength to pull something that massive; the average quo was the size of a forge tank and weighed a solid ten tons even after he had gutted it and removed the head. And due to the sheer size of the animal Luke couldn’t make a straight line towards his cave; the Quo would have gotten stuck between trees and rocks. So naturally it was a good thing that meat didn’t bruise after the animal died because after hurling the body over several cliffs and sending it bouncing down a number of rocky slopes Luke was more than convinced that he had tenderized the hell out of that thing.

 Carving it and carving it quick was Luke’s first priority. He wasn’t sure how long he could go before the Styklers’ anxiety over his presence became secondary to their desire for his kill. So Luke pulled the body as close to the entrance of his cave as he possibly could and blocked the Styklers from seeing the entrance to his cave. After carving off all the lean meat from one side of the animal Luke found he still had room in his cave for a bit more. He covered the hole, rotated the body around and found a young Stykler gnawing at the other side. Luke shooed it, looked around in the dark at the crowds of glowing green eyes that peered at him and concealed his position once more. He carved off what more meat he could, climbed into his hole and covered it. Once in the cave Luke piled his gear in the corner, climbed into bed and relaxed to the sounds of twenty plus ravenous Styklers devouring the mountain of flesh no more than a few feet above him. And as he fell into a deep, much-desired sleep, Luke remained uncertain of his immediate future. With his meet he could survive, but at the moment, as he had been for the last while, he was merely existing. However, the moment he was now living for would be coming sooner than he thought.

Chapter 10

 The soldiers marched down the canyon in standard formation. The basic Legionnaire infantry, the Knights, lead the squad in front and interspersed themselves throughout the group. To every Knight there was one specialty soldier, be it a Demolitionist, a Berserker, a Phantom, or the newly reinstated Skirmishers. Monoliths, Helldogs, and Nightwolves were normally reserved for situations where a violent encounter was an inevitable truth. But this was a simple supply train and the closest Darks were hundreds of miles away in Praemon. On the broad scale of things that was fairly close, however seeing as how Darks never ventured far beyond the borders of Praemon and the battlecruiser armadas held a tight perimeter it wasn’t much of a concern.

 The soldiers held their guns loosely in front of them; there weren’t any dangers of which they were particularly concerned. The most dangerous wildlife in the area were Styklers and those never attacked anything that wasn’t biological. The tanks and armored vehicles scared them what with their metal exteriors and their mechanical noises.

 The soldiers marched in squares that surrounded each vehicle, each square connecting to the next one and each side of each square consisted of three soldiers. That was thirty soldiers in all.

 The brown canyon walls rose up high all around them. The trees leaned over the cliff as though intending to fall down on top of them at any given moment and barely allowed sight of the blue cloudy sky above. It was narrow, too; the Forge tank only allowed a few feet on each side for the soldiers to march.

 Inside the Forge tank sat three operators and a Lieutenant, who sat back and tossed commands around at his men with an attitude that suggested complete apathy.

 “Check for movement in the surrounding area and cross check it with all known Dark encampments.” He’d say lazily. “Keep thermals up and running and I want the particle cannons set at fifty percent power, selecting and destroying all targets between five feet and ten feet in height and a core body temperature between ninety five degrees and one hundred and one degrees. And make sure that… just forget it. You know what to do.”

 The inside of the tank was dark, save for the bluish glow of the holographic touchscreens . There were no windows; all visuals of the outside world were visible through the fifteen cameras scattered across the exterior of the tank, those images projected on the glowing screens which concealed the better portion of the tank’s interior walls. Their faces blue beneath the glow of the screens the operators would respond with ‘affirmatives’ and ‘copy that’s and go about the mundane task of checking for dangerous things that weren’t there. The Lieutenant pulled out his hand radio and thumbed the transmit button.

 “Sergeant I want you to run a routine check of the platoons ammo levels and make sure that their carrying a full loadout.”

 There was a groan that was purposefully exaggerated. The voice was the deep grumble of a Berserker. “You kiddin’ me, Sarge? We been marchin’ ere for a good fo’ hours  an’ you wan’ me to check the ammo levels? We aint even fired at nothin’ yet!”

 The Lieutenant gave a bored sigh and replied. “We’ll do it around the next checkpoint. Just… just do what you normally do.”

 The Berserker gave a quick ‘yessir’.

 The Lieutenant tapped his hand on a nearby surface and sighed again. It seemed like the only think he could do for entertainment was sigh. He shook his head in surprise; he was so bored he actually thought that a slow release of air from his lungs would entertain him. He had to get out of this tank bad.

 “Wait…” Said the operator sitting in front of the radar screen. “Wait… sir!”

 The Lieutenant muttered a reply. “What.”

 “Movement, sir. Just outside the exit of the canyon.”